Monday, September 14, 2009

I fundamentally wear two different hats on this blog, the first is a sociologist, and the other is a philosopher. I enjoy studying both of them, but it's also important to understand that though I may combine the two to form my worldview and opinions they are in fact very different disciplines with their own set of rules and focuses.

There's something of a stereotype out there of sociologists that I'm sure people are at least tangentially aware of. On Saturday Night Live Nora Dunn played a man hating lesbian sociologist, and though this concept was played for laughs it still struck close to home in terms of how many people see the field and the people in it. Mainly, that we are always talking about how the system is oppressive, the patriarchy is the enemy, the little guy needs to stand up, etc. etc. This often gets us painted as far leftists, anarchists, or radicals, and I've had to shake this sort of image off when I talk about my field of study many times before because I am none of the above, my passion for LGBT rights notwithstanding (I actually tend to think of myself as fairly moderate on most issues in the sense of not being militant).

Well, I hate to tell you this, but if that's the way the typical stereotype of a sociologist thinks they aren't following one of the cardinal rules of sociology. It's sometimes easy to forget that sociology is in fact social science, meaning that while there are a number of abstract concepts and theories floating around they are still grounded in the concepts of science, and the sort of political proselytizing that goes on has no place in the discipline. That's not to say that it can't be used, there are in fact many ways to apply it to the real world and use it to push for social change, but the sociologists themselves should not be doing that while presenting it under the guise of science, because it isn't. It's politics and, more to the point, philosophy, which is where my other hat comes in.

A sociologist fundamentally looks at the how and in some cases the why, for instance we can wonder how racism came about and why it keeps existing, but when it comes to actually making any value judgments about it that is out of our league. To put it simply, if we go in looking for an oppressive system we are going to find it, and our results will be skewed. It's impossible to escape this bias completely (we are human after all) but we shouldn't actively look for it either, and this is the mistake so many people make when walking under the banner of sociology. We are not tasked to explain the injustice of someone losing their job to outsourcing, all we do is say why it happens and what happens when it does. As cold as it sounds, we have to remove the person who lost their job from the equation, because we fundamentally are not concerned with the individual, we are concerned with the system he or she lives in.

When you want to talk about injustice that's where philosophy comes in, and that's my other hat. Now I'm very much guilty of crossing the two as well, but at least I'm aware that the two modes of thought are different.

It's my belief that you need both to have a complete understanding of the world. Scientists can sometimes become so detached from the actual people that they can be unethical, while philosophers can lose their grounding in reality and become caught up in abstracts. Both need to compliment the other, but they have to remain a proper distance from each other to keep their integrity.

To put it simply, science is the way to find out about the world, while philosophy looks at the ramifications in an abstract sense. Crossing the two is a mistake, since it compromises what both are supposed to do, and while I can and do apply both to my worldview, I have to switch my hats in order to get the whole picture.

So as the Ghostbusters said, don't cross the streams. In the movie it did work out for the better, but the chances were vastly in favor of it exploding spectacularly.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Yuri-service. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with anime probably knows what I’m talking about. If not, picture this: Two girls, staring at each other passionately, fingers intertwined with flowers blowing around them. This is an increasingly common sight in a variety of genres, but rarely does it go beyond that and turns into an actual lesbian relationship. Real life lesbians like myself tend to gnash our teeth at this, but practically since anime was first becoming known in the United States this has been a major component, but there’s a growing sense of discontent among fans of Yuri that can be summed up in one sentence:

Stop teasing us.

The problem with most of the subtext these days is that it’s just that: subtext. It exists purely to titillate and make fans think about characters being in a relationship, but it rarely if ever delivers. One blogger I follow recently proclaimed that shows should “stop being half-assed about the lesbian aspect”, and this seems to be a growing opinion among those of us who like our girls love.

This is hardly new phenomenon in anime. In 2001 Noir became the newest of these shows imported to the United States and the first major exposure I had to anime as a whole. In my opinion, it was a great series that kept you on the edge of your seat and had an interesting and complex story, but the main draw was the relationship between the leads, Kirika and Mirielle, and how they grew to care for each other in the end. We could debate until the cows come home about whether it really was a Yuri series since there was never definitive "proof" that they were lesbians, and indeed people have been fighting about that even though it’s been over 7 years since the show was on the air. But even if you think there was no romance to speak of between the female leads you have to agree that they loved each other in a very deep and emotional way.

But what made Noir different from the Yuri-service shows these days was that the girls and their feelings were not just fanservice, they had an actual impact on the plot and real, visible consequences. In fact, you could even read it as being one of the driving forces behind the plot. These girls had real emotional investment in one another and were willing to fight and die for it, and there’s a strong indication at the end of the show that this relationship is going to continue and grow into something more, be it romantic or not.

Revolutionary Girl Utena was a 1997 series that similarly used the not-necessarily romantic but certainly passionate relationship between its female leads to drive the plot and question the very meaning of gender and relationships, but trying to summarize Utena like that is leaving out about 90% of everything else that went on in it, and we don’t have all day. The point is that the reason these shows are so loved is that the Yuri was not just service, it was a major component of the story and was given just as much attention and thought as any other part of the plot.

Nowadays? Not so much. There are a few examples that stand out like Aoi Hana, but they're mostly for niche audiences and rarely get much attention outside of these circles. In mainstream works these characters are mostly limited to side roles and don’t have much of an impact on the story itself. And there’s the classic “bait and switch” tactic which consists of setting up a girl/girl pairing and then having one or both end up with men in the end. This infuriates fans for two reasons, first it means that all the hints and subtext was just a tease, and second it sends the rather homophobic message of “look but don’t touch” or that a girl/girl relationship is okay when you’re young, but “real” women grow up and have husbands and families.

Granted, we are talking about shows that come from Japan, a country that has very different social values from our own, so what we see as an unfriendly message may in fact be perfectly acceptable to them, and the above message is considered acceptable by most Japanese viewers at this point in time. But putting that aside, in the United States there’s another part of this that seems to be irritating an increasing number of people.

Mainly, the fanservice aspect, which depending on the show can range from mildly annoying to downright disrespectful. By “downright disrespectful” I mean “these characters exist only in the show to provide breast and butt shots” and have no character or purpose besides their connection to another girl and the risqué situations that result in them being in the same room. While certainly not free of subtext, Noir and Utena generally stayed away from this, and in the case of Utena much of the sexual content that would be fanservice in any other series was intended to be and managed to be quite disturbing given the circumstances. The movie of Utena is another story, and is best left to its own post, but even it contained the suggestion that sex is not all its cracked up to be no matter who is doing it.

Nowadays the Yuri fanservice is generally played completely straight. Given that most of the viewers of these shows tend to be young males this might not be surprising, as someone else pointed out that to a lot of men the appeal of seeing a pair of lesbians can be summed up as “1 + 1 = 2”. But there's only so much teasing a person can take before they start to get fed up and want the real thing, and the fact that even the men these shows are supposed to appeal to are getting tired of it might indicate that a sea change might be needed if these fans want to be retained.

I predict that in the future these feelings will also crop up in Japan, though probably at least several years from now. The Americans watching, on the other hand, may turn to their own country’s works in the meantime as long as the teasing continues to be just that: teasing.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

One issue that frequently comes up when discussing gender identity and transgender and transsexual people has to do with access to bathrooms, an issue most of us never think twice about. We take advantage of the fact that in a public setting we can walk into the gendered bathroom of our choice and not face retaliation or even a second look. But if you're a person who identifies otherwise an essential part of daily life becomes a stressful ordeal each and every time you have to use the bathroom.

The Advocate covered a story about a transgender woman was was barred from using a Denny's restroom consistent with her gender identity until she had finished transitioning, and the question now is whether or not she has the right to sue the company. Denny's denied the charge of discrimination, saying that "allowing a biological male to use the female restroom despite gender identity will pose a direct threat to the health and well-being of staff and customers". The story goes on to use the "slippery slope" argument, arguing that someone with "devious intent" could take advantage of any concessions.

There's a growing body of literature on this issue and a growing awareness of the issues in and outside the LGBT community, with sites like safe2pee compiling city-by-city lists of gender neutral or single bathrooms, and several college campuses have started instituting gender neutral facilities to help transgender students.

Before the end of the school year I was interviewed by two students in a media class who had been interviewing students about the proposed introduction of gender neutral bathrooms on our campus. After I did my spot, where I argued that since every middle class home in America already has a gender neutral bathroom without issue this should not be that big of a deal, I was told by the two students that in taking interviews they had found the female students more receptive to the idea, while the male students expressed nervousness at the idea of women being in the same bathroom. This surprised me, but it got me thinking.

Why is this such a contemptuous issue shows that it's an intersection between gender, sexuality and social norms, as well as bringing in issues of privacy and access. In some ways bathrooms represent the last significant and formal gender divide in our society, so it's understandable that it causes people to react strongly to it no matter where they stand on it. But when it comes to denying people access to the bathroom of the gender they identify with it crosses into human rights and privacy, since it opens up large avenues of legal issues. Whether the person who needs to use the facility has more right than a person who may be uncomfortable with the idea of a person who is still biologically another sex using the same facilities is a philosophical debate that I can't fully cover here, but it's a fight that we usually aren't aware of.

I was in a multiple -stall gender neutral bathroom at an LGBT conference last year, and while I was a bit startled when a man walked in it didn't seem especially weird. Just about everyone was some variant of LGBT at that conference, but the point still stands. It doesn't seem like this should be as big an issue as it is, but one thing I've found is that whenever an issue like this is brought up people's reactions are unpredictable and sometimes very revealing of how deeply we hold certain sociological norms.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

An article in today's edition of The Economisttook a look at the spread of gay marriage and the potential sociological effects of it. The tone generally seems to be “so what?” and it suggests that this is increasingly the public’s response to the issue. I also saw an article about a Maine Bishop calling gay marriage a “dangerous sociological experiment”, a phrase that made me raise an eyebrow. Despite the so-called “Storm” that has been brewing, this issue is not new in a sociological sense.

First off, gay families have existed for quite some time already, this is nothing new. All current legislation does is formally recognize them, so in a strictly literal sense not much changes when marriage is legalized. Most of the benefits of being married do not take directly visible form, so a gay couple who is married will more or less continue to live the same way, so there will be very few visible effects on the community they live in.

Similarly, even though there are prohibitions in place to prevent gay couples from adopting in several states gay people have and will continue to give birth to and adopt children. Though it’s hard to measure the exact statistics of gay adoption, the fact is that gay people do have children one way or another and there’s little that can be done to prevent it. The whole “protecting children” argument also hits an iceberg, since it's been shown that the children of same sex couples have better mental health when their parents' union is recognized, as reported by the Vermont Psychological association.

The tired out argument that gay marriages threaten traditional marriage and the nuclear family hits its biggest pothole when you realize that those two concepts - traditional marriage and the nuclear family - are at this point in history already an endangered species. What always bugs me when this argument is made is that it undermines the experiences of people who have been raised in single parent households for generations. While it is true that children in single-parent families live disproportionately in poverty, society has adapted to cope with these situations, and now even the President of the United States is the product of such a family, so it can't be said that a single parent put a child at an automatic disadvantage.

Likewise, the argument that children need both a mother and a father hits a similar logical snare when you take single parents and other family situations into account. The first linked article makes an interesting point about how even in gay families there tends to be a "mom" role and a "dad" role, but this may be applying gender roles that don't entirely fit the situation. And if we look at the pure concept of "mom" and "dad" as social roles we can also see that these have been changing for quite some time, since there is no longer a strict divide between the two now that most households have two working parents rather than a single breadwinner.

In short, if they've been trying to prevent a storm they're far too late, if anything they're at the eye already.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

The other day I was having a discussion with someone I know when gay rights came up. I try not to shoehorn the subject into my conversations, but it happened to come up then because of the whole Miss California debacle. Somehow during the conversation I ended up mentioning something about LGBT people being a minority, and this person (who happens to be Hispanic, but that’s not relevant to the topic) objected to me classifying LGBT people as a minority.

Once I managed to avoid going into huffy mode I tried to ask what she meant by minority versus what I meant, and it got me thinking about how this seems to be a pervasive topic. When legislation is introduced in wider non-discrimination causes to protect LGBT people it often raises people’s hackles, and a lot of work in the LGBT community has revolved around building to community’s strength and having it be recognized as a minority. But what does it really mean to be a minority, and what are the criteria for being a “real” minority?

In a purely descriptive sense LGBT people are a minority in the sense that they are not the majority. Depending on who you ask the percent of LGBT people in the United States is anywhere between less than 1% and 10%, and it’s nearly impossible to nail down exactly how many LGBT people there are both in and out of the closet. But in the United States to be a “minority” carries with it a special status and certain implications. We don’t consider people with blue eyes to be a minority, but we consider people of African descent to be. So it can’t be said that minority status is just based on physical characteristics, instead there has to be some consequence to belonging to a particular group for it to be a recognized minority.

These consequences don’t have to be as formal as institutionalized racism and homophobia, but those are certainly forms they can take. It seems that we only get a recognized minority when there’s some system in place that splits people up along lines of belonging or not belonging, which usually takes the form of race or ethnicity. Now we have laws in place that prohibit discrimination based on race, but it does not stop all of it. Now you just can’t be formal about it, it has to take more covert forms.

I think we’re all familiar with how race and racism manifests in our society, but when it comes to sexual orientation some people get up in arms about classifying LGBT people as a minority. I can only speculate, but I imagine that it in part has to do with the fact that some people don’t like that in asserting themselves LGBT people are “intruding” on a space that used to be reserved for races and ethnicities. Since there are still a large number of people who think that you “choose” to be gay that may also impact whether they consider LGBT people a minority. We don’t, for instance, consider as small group of Democrats in a mostly Republican town to be a minority in the same sense that a community of color would be, since you choose which political party you affiliate with and can change it relatively easily. It gets complicated when you get into religious minorities, since they are often closely tied to ethnicity and cultural identity, and historically persecution of religious minorities has been a vigorous as the persecution of races (the repeal of the Edict of Nantes is a perfect example of how this sort of religious persecution can take a concrete form).

There’s no doubt that LGBT people are persecuted in formal and informal ways. One needs look no further than Proposition 8 to see the extreme form this can take, when people spend millions of dollars of their own money to prevent one group from having a right. Persecution can also take the form of lack of protection, and this indeed the case in many LGBT issues. Hate crimes are a way of recognizing minority status, but there has been much opposition to widening the umbrella of what’s considered a “hate crime” since in declaring that an attack against one group is a hate crime minority status is implicitly granted.

So there’s little doubt that LGBT are indeed a minority in the strictly numerical sense, and there’s little doubt that systems exist to deprive LGBT people of rights and liberties and formal and informal settings. But there is still resistance to recognizing the LGBT as a legitimate minority despite this, and this is where we get into the meat of it.

The idea that you can only be “born” into a minority may contribute to why it’s so hard for the LGBT community to assert itself as a legitimate minority. The vast majority of LGBT people I know say that they were born that way, but that’s not a widely held view at this point. Since a person can also hide their orientation this may also contribute to the idea that LGBT are not a “real” minority, since it’s not like skin color or bone structure and short of passing for another race one cannot “change” their race.

In the wider sense I think the reluctance to recognize the LGBT community as a minority stems from the fact that calling a group a minority grants them a certain amount of legitimacy and power, especially in the legal arena. To recognize the LGBT community as a minority means that anti-discrimination laws have to be enforced in the case of discrimination based on orientation or gender identity, and it forces judges to apply equal protection statues to cases involving LGBT issues.

This naturally opens up a whole slew of issues that opponents of marriage equality and LGBT rights do not want this to happen, since it not only grants rights they want taken away but frames them as bigots going after a persecuted minority and undermines the legitimacy their authority and cause. They become bullies, and at that point it becomes harder and harder for them to justify their actions to the public. They clearly do not want this to happen, so a large part of their campaign works to frame LGBT people as a dangerous “other” who threaten the minority by their existence and in the process deny the very real discrimination that they perpetrate against a community that has few protections against their actions.

As for my friend, I do not believe she meant any ill will, but she was a good demonstration of why it is so hard for the LGBT movement to gain ground when we’re still struggling to even be recognized as a minority whose rights are being impeded on.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Like most people over the age of 14 I can best describe my opinion of Hannah Montana as tepid, if not outright negative, but I've been able to ignore it for the most part. I did watch it once while at a relative's house with my younger cousins, and I found it to be fairly bland sitcom fair full of the usual cliches. The music grates on my nerves and musical sensibilities, but it seems fairly harmless compared to other things out there at the moment. I'm sure there are elements from my early adolescence that appeared the same back then, but one blog I follow brought up an issue with the new movie that made me raise an eyebrow.

The Sinister Hidden Message of Hannah Montana by Mark Blankenship, while obviously mostly in a tongue and cheek tone, did bring up an aspect of the movie that I find troubling as a gay American. I gather that the basic premise of the show is that Miley Stewart leads a double life as the pop start Hannah Montana, and in the movie she starts to tire of it and considers showing her fans who she really is. At the climax of the newly released movie, after Miley manages to save her hometown with a benefit concert put on by her alter-ego, she takes off her wig to reveal her true self, but the residents of the town tell her to put in back on and be Hannah again.

"Put on the wig, or you'll never have a normal life!" one person calls, and they all promise not to reveal her identity to the rest of the world so she can be "happy" and so her fans won't "lose their dreams" and find out that Hannah isn't real. To my gay ears that sounds uncomfortably close to telling someone that they should stay in the closet rather than come out, but I know I have a tendency to read too much into things like this. But even outside that, is that really what we want our kids to learn, that it's better to live a double life than be true to yourself and risk being rejected? Considering that the latter was largely a message in the media of my childhood this strikes me as rather backwards looking.

To quote Blankenship:

As written, the conclusion tells viewers that being yourself is acceptable when you're with a very intimate circle, but otherwise, it's preferable and even honorable to lie about who you are. Hannah Montana: The Movie suggests that we can make people happy by always being who they want us to be, so we should maintain a performance at all costs. What's a little personal integrity when the entire world will be placated by our perpetual public disguise?

I know I'm disturbed by the implications of this and what it's telling our kids, and it certainly seems like a screwed up moral to say that lying about yourself is okay, whether you're gay or not.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Despite the fact that, to put it mildly, I’m thrilled that the number of states where I can get legally married doubled in a little under a week, I haven’t had much to say on here lately, mostly because of end of the semester work and general life craziness. But the occasional philosophical and sociological trains of thought do come up, it’s just a matter of whether or not I have the energy to write them down after everything else that's on my plate. Nonetheless, I’ll try to keep this going with the occasional update, of which this is one.

In my Philosophy of Race & Gender class we had a discussion about the outing of gay, lesbian and bisexual people (and presumably trans people as well, though this was not discussed in this particular case) and whether it is appropriate to out these people and under what circumstances. My position is that under most circumstances it's not appropriate to out someone without their permission, since outing a person who is not ready to be outed is fundamentally taking the control of that event away from them, and I can say from personal experience that the process of outing is terrifying, and being outed without your permission increases that terror substantially. But I disagree that outing is bad in all circumstances, especially in the case of a politician who engages in gay behavior in secret but uses their political power to persecute other LGBT people. In this discussion I cited The Frank Rule, coined by and named after the Congessional Representative from my home state and the chair of House Financial Services Committee, the one and only Barney Frank.

Congressman Frank is famous for several things: First, being grumpy, second, having a razor sharp sense of humor, third, for being a stanch critic of government spending, and fourth, being openly gay since 1981 and an outspoken LGBT advocate, and I've had the good fortune to meet Congressman Frank in person at a talk he gave at the University of Massachusetts many years ago. My father took me to this talk, and though I was too young to really understand what he was talking about or what the fact that he was gay really meant, I remember he was funny, and that despite my expectations I was not in fact bored by what he was saying. I mention this because I've also had the dubious honor of interrupting fellow Massachusetts Congressman John Olver at a talk he was giving, though I was even younger at the time and Congressman Olver is by all accounts both incredibly intelligent and extremely boring.

Back to the subject, The Frank Rule can best be summed up by the Congressman himself:

"I think there's a right to privacy. But the right to privacy should not be a right to hypocrisy. And people who want to demonize other people shouldn't then be able to go home and close the door and do it themselves."

It's a simple enough concept, don't be a hypocrite. I think we can all agree that there are few things worse than someone who crusades against something one minute and participates in it themselves the next. But what stuck out to me in light of today's class was how Congressman Frank makes a distinction between privacy and secrecy, which was one of our topics.

It has been interpreted that we right to privacy guaranteed in our Constitution, and in the LGBT rights movement this has been key to throwing out discriminatory laws and practices that intrude on that right. Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court case that invalidated all the remaining sodomy laws in the U.S. and basically said that the government has no right to regulate the sex lives of two consenting adults. I could go into just what "sodomy" is, but that's another "What Does That Really Mean?" post on its own. When it comes to privacy in the case of outing, it becomes a philosophical and normative question, which happen to be my specialties.

"Privacy" in the purest definition of the word is simply to be free from unwanted intrusion. When you compare this to the idea of "Secrecy", or the intentional concealment of something, it becomes clear that why most secrets are considered private not all private things are secret. I may have privacy in a bathroom stall, but it's no secret what I'm doing in there. When you approach outing as an issue privacy and secrecy overlap, and if someone does not want to be outed the question then becomes whether that part of them is considered private or if it's a secret that is fair game.

In most cases I'm inclined to say that no one has the right to out you without your permission. One analysis I read on the issue tried to address the points of privacy and secrecy, but in it the author failed to acknowledge the vast and varied consequences the process of being outed carries with it. You can lose your job, be thrown out of your home, disowned, beaten up, and even killed, and because these events are far too common the process of outing carries with it an extreme fear. LGBT people have to navigate their lives based on who they are and are not out to, and with just about every relationship there's the question of whether it's safe to be out to this person. I have another post in the works that discusses issues like this and how they're symptomatic of heteronormativity, but that's for another day, and all we need to know now is that it's a downright scary concept.

I'm in no way suggesting that politicians and other public figures who are outed do not face these same issues, but because of their positions their lives are already in the in-between space between public and private, and the issue becomes more complicated. Politicians especially are meant to represent the values of the communities they represent, so intentional deceit and secrecy on their part has an element of power abuse that goes with it.

In cases where a closeted politician is staunchly anti-gay it takes on an even more malicious bent, and besides deceiving their constituents a closeted anti-gay politician creates a cycle of self destruction through their actions that enables further discriminatory action to take place. While politicians are not exempt from a right to privacy merely because of their positions, their privacy is of a different sort and carries broader consequences, especially in cases of deceit. As awful as it is to lie to your family and friends, when you lie to your constituents and work to demonize and disenfranchise an already vulnerable group while engaging in that same behavior yourself the weight of the hypocrisy becomes much greater. As much as I realize that these politicians must go through great mental anguish because of their hatred for themselves, my sympathy stops at the point where they channel that hatred towards causing harm to people in the same position, and I believe they should be accountable for their actions if they are indeed shown to be engaging in hypocritical behavior as they would be in any context where their behavior is shown to be contrary to their rhetoric.

In short, I agree with Congressman Frank. I have no right to out someone without their permission, but in cases of hypocrisy and abuse of power the right of the people to know what their representatives are doing outweighs their right to keep secrets as long as we want an accountable and transparent system of government. You can do what you want with your life, but once you start using your own issues to restrict mine I draw the line. Or to quote the Congressman:

I take it personally when people decide to take political batting practice with my life.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Coming of the heels of my first “What Does That Really Mean?” post about the word Normal, we have a story about dubious application of norms and normative language coming off the wire.

Justin Reynolds, a gay male student in Florida, was removed from class after coming to school in a v-neck shirt, blue jeans, high heeled boots and jewelry. He did it so he could make a presentation about transgender rights. He checked with his teacher first, and though the teacher discouraged him they did not explicitly tell him not to do it. Later in the day was removed from the school due to a dress code policy that states that student’s clothing should be "keeping with their gender", and that a student can be removed if their clothing is "inappropriate" and "disrupts the school process".

Besides issues about whether under that logic girls shouldn’t be allowed to wear typically “male” clothing (and I can tell right away that would get me in trouble), there’s a clear application of norms here, and since they never actually define what clothing “keeping with their gender” is there are huge assumptions at play here. You’re expected to know what your gender is supposed to wear, and I suppose if you come from a country where it’s different or reversed you’re out of luck.

There have been similar cases in the past, including one in Massachusetts in 2000 that tackled the issue of whether Pat Doe, a biologically male student who identified as female, was allowed to wear clothing matching her gender identity to her high school. The court ruled in favor of Doe, and rejected the idea that the harassment she was receiving from her peers constituted a “disruption” to the learning environment and grounds for her to be forced to wear “male” clothing. Justice Linda E. Giles’s opinion on this facet of it the case was particularly succinct:

"To rule in [the school's] favor in this regard, however, would grant those contentious students a 'heckler's veto’… This court trusts that exposing children to diversity at an early age serves the important social goals of increasing their ability to tolerate such differences and teaching them respect for everyone's unique personal experience in that 'Brave New World' out there."

Of course, that’s Massachusetts, and this case clearly isn’t identical. However, it does raise some interesting points about whether what Justin did should be considered educational as well, since he was doing it for the express purpose of giving a presentation. And is this issue really about what he wore, or is it about whether people respect each other enough to not care what another person wears? There’s an interesting cause-and-effect relationship here, and several of the students interviewed for that particular article didn’t seem to think he was disruptive, if anything it seems that it was the staff who had a problem with it.

The attire worn by Justin doesn’t strike me as especially “male” or “female” – it’s just jeans and a shirt, though he did pad a bra to give the illusion of breasts and wear eyeliner and mascara, though in the case of the latter two many men who aren’t in drag wear it as well. A bit of personal bias is about to creep in here, but I personally prefer clothing that’s gender neutral. I’m also critical of clothing and products that are gendered when I don’t feel they have to be, like slippers and socks. Part of this is because I happen to have very wide feet and am not fond of high heels, but also it’s because I really don’t think it’s needed in some cases, and it just complicates things when all you want are things to keep your feet warm. Now, would he have been considered disruptive if he'd just worn it without trying to make a point? The policy is so unclear that it's hard to tell, though other things about this school make me think that they would have done it anyway.

I don’t think there’s much about what he did that could be considered inappropriate or disruptive, since trying to make a point is not the same thing as being disruptive, though they can overlap. It’s been my experience that school policy tends to use very ambiguous language, and it tends to result in issues like this. What do "disruptive" and "inappropriate" mean? To whom is it disruptive? Is it still inappropriate if only one person feels that it is? If they change their mind does it stay disruptive, or can it stop being inappropriate? As you can see it gets muddy, and this is the danger of using subjective language in policy, especially when it's normative language, and the administrators at Dunnellon High School have fallen right into it.

Justin says he’s not planning on pursuing the issue any further, but maybe this will make them rethink their policies and what they're really saying in them, since from the sound of it they don't know themselves.

I’m often getting into trouble for asking just what people mean when they say certain things, and in many cases it seems that people don’t really know the meaning of what they’re saying or what they’re implying by saying it. The purpose of this series is to look at some of the words we use everyday and take at face value, and while we’re at it deconstruct them so we can find out what’s really being said.

I’ll start with one of the basics of sociology and expand from there. Our first target?

Normal. This has to be one of the most abused words in the English language and one of the most misunderstood, since people use it in a variety of contexts where it doesn’t belong.

The best example of this that I can think of occurred at a workshop I went to that explored the concept of bisexuality and the myths surrounding it. A major part of this workshop involved ranking yourself anonymously on the Kinsey Scale at different points in your life, and then having your survey anonymously given to another person who stood in for you on a giant version of the scale set up in the room. At the very end we each read what our survey taker defined themselves as, and in the mix of “gay” “lesbian” “bisexual” and “straight” answers there was one “normal”, which drew negative reactions from the rest of the room.

This was a clear case of someone using the word normal as a value judgment, and given that at that point most of the other participants were some variant of LGBT the negative reaction was understandable. With the rest of this person’s responses taken into account (several of which bordered on homophobic) there was a clear implication that anyone who did not consider themselves a full Kinsey 0 like this person was wrong and somehow deficient, the irony being that within this particular group this person was actually in the minority, as the participation of the LGBT group on campus meant that most of the participants were in fact clustered towards the greater numbers on the scale. The very fact that this person felt the need to call themselves normal rather than simply “heterosexual” or “straight” demonstrates just how important this concept is to our sense of identity. But as per the title of this article, what does it actually mean, and what do people mean by it? That’s what I’m trying to answer.

On a very basic level the root of the word is Norm, one of my favorite words. A norm is, simply enough:

“A standard, model, or pattern regarded as typical.”

What I love about this word right off the bat is the fact that "regarded" is in there, telling us that it’s subjective rather than a universal, unchanging concept. You can’t isolate normal and put it in a jar, and a norm doesn’t exist until someone defines it. Additionally, trying to get people to agree on what is normal for a particular thing will inevitably produce varying results.

Another thing I love is the fact that a norm by itself has no value judgment attached to it, it’s just something that exists and can be studied. I’m about to veer into Sociology 101 territory for a moment, so bear with me so we can get that part of the definition out of the way. A norm is what a group uses to police itself and its behavioral expectations, and a law can be thought of as an elevated and codified norm, but not all norms are laws. In fact, most are unwritten and unspoken, it’s just assumed you’ll know what they are and that you shouldn’t break them.

These leads us to the other aspect that defines a norm, which is that breaking one carries repercussions, be they as formal as legal action and imprisonment or as informal as a dirty look. But once again there’s no value judgment attached to either the action or the repercussion, all that makes a norm is that someone creates a standard around something and that someone might deviate from it.

So Normal, then, being the adjective form of the word, describes a something that stays within the bounds of the norm. This can be applied to people, inanimate objects, and both conscious and unconscious behaviors. To be normal is not to be good or bad, it’s just to be within the bounds of what someone set as a norm. I know I sound like a broken record as this point, but you’ll see once again that there have been no value judgments in any of these, they’re merely saying that something is or is not part of a norm. I keep stressing this because oftentimes when people use the word “normal” they are attaching a value judgment, and it’s that part of the use of the word we’re here to deconstruct.

When you use normal to apply a value judgment you’re no longer using it just to describe the norm, and the word itself becomes a way to police the edges of the acceptable and decide what belongs inside and outside of it. This is where it has the potential to become malicious, and many of the problems in our society can be traced to reactions towards people who fall outside what's seen as the norm. These situations generally go one of two ways: a person is either pushed to change their behavior so they fall inside the norm or they are rejected and made into an outsider, a process referred to as "otherization". To be abnormal is to be looked down upon and segregated, so the desire to be normal impacts just about every part of our life and the choices we make at some level, though we are almost never aware of the fact that we’re doing this.

A quick search on Amazon reveals that over 603,000 books have “normal” in their titles, and though these days many of these books are about deconstructing the idea of normal, the average layperson, like that participant in my panel, believes that being normal means to be right and good, so clearly as a society we’re a long way from understanding what it really means. I tend to not only ask what people do when faced with certain questions, but also what they don’t do, since that’s as important if not more important than what actually occurs. And since we tend to take norms at face value no one ever seems to ask who came up with those norms or why, and the process of trying to define and analyze them is a fundamental principle of sociology.

So, the next time you hear the word “normal”, take a moment to consider just what’s being implied by it, and whether it’s being used to simply describe something that’s viewed as typical, or if it has another purpose and is being used to classify people as good or bad.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Recently in the news it came to light that the Human Rights Campaign has adopted a policy on the inclusion of trans-inclusive protections in the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), and have said that they will not support the Act if it does not include trans protection. This is a reversal of a 2007 decision to support the Act without trans protection, and the backlash over the original decision was immense, leading to the resignation of several prominent members of the HRC and intense criticism from the LGBT community.

The HRC’s official statement on the matter is that the 2007 decision was a “one time exception” made because of the political climate of the time and the belief that ENDA would pass with sexual orientation defined and the trans protections left out. Though they have been lauded for this new development and the fact that they've rescinded their original policy, the memory of their 2007 stance is still fresh in the minds of many, and is symptomatic of a major rift in the LGBT community between the LGB and the T.

Within every social movement and political movement there are lines drawn and loyalties defined, and inevitably someone is left out or seen as expendable. In this case the transgender communities felt betrayed by the HRC’s refusal to push for inclusion in ENDA, and as in this case very often the ones who are left out are also the most vulnerable. This was nearly the case in the Women’s Rights Movement and the push for the Equal Rights Amendment, and lesbians almost found themselves thrown under the bus for the sake of political advancement, though it was thankfully averted at the last moment, and perhaps because of that the Amendment died in the water. And now some gays have similarly turned on the trans community when passage of ENDA is so close, but it doesn't have to be that way.

A way of understanding this phenomenon can be found in the social order theory, which states that certain groups move upwards as they gain more prominence and acceptance within society. I grew up near a town that was a perfect example of this theory in action: The top of the hill was the most desirable place to live, and through the decades the ethnic makeup the area changed from white Anglo-Saxon Protestant to Catholic and Irish and later people of color, first wealthy African Americans and then Asians. At the moment the people below the hill are mainly Hispanic and Caribbean, though some of them have begun to advance up the hill. Within that town we see a snapshot of American culture and cultural acceptance, with those at the top of the hill being “true” Americans while those below are still struggling to assert their place within our society.

The state of the LGBT community can similarly be seen as tiered. At the top are “regular” gays and lesbians, people who can “pass” for straight and are seen as culturally acceptable by Americans who don’t mind a gay person as long as they “act straight” (note the quotation marks in the last sentence and throughout this article). This is the type most commonly seen in the media and the least likely to arouse extreme hatred. Following these are the ones seen as flamboyant or behave outside their expected gender role, and in this level the possibility of retaliation is much higher, and jokes and stereotypes about this group are more widely accepted. Following them are bisexuals, and besides facing persecution within the LGBT community, many people still doubt the existence of true bisexuality and not just “confusion” or “indecisiveness”. This is also expressed in media, which has a continuing reluctance to accept that some people are attracted to both men and women and are under no obligation to "choose" a "side".

We then get to the T, and even below them are the Is, the Intersexuals. While it can be said that most people have at least a passing familiarity with the concept of transsexuality the same cannot be said of Intersexuals, who sometimes find themselves subjected to persecution by transsexuals. No one is talking about intersexual rights at the moment in any national venue, so instead it's the transsexuals who most often find themselves left out and discarded for the sake of “advancing the cause” and securing rights of the “majority”.

Perhaps in the case of transsexuals (and by extension, intersexuals) a certain amount of this can be attributed to just how deeply rooted the concept of a binary male/female gender system is, so by extension those who cross gender lines are seen as a threat by people who might accept gay men and women as long as they act like men and women respectively. Mainly, though, this can be seen as another manifestation of the social order, and the desire for one group to advance itself even if that means sacrificing some of its allies.

This is in no way meant to excuse that behavior, as I said the most unjust part of this is that those who are the most vulnerable are the ones left behind, but it is simply in the nature of our current political system for the fringes to be discarded. In presidential elections both parties will attempt to distance themselves from the far right and far left once they clinch the nomination in an attempt to reach for the all-important center and the majority in the national election. Any group that enters the national stage will eventually do this, but in cases such as this the abandonment of the vulnerable should rightly be thought as sickening and threatening to the very purpose of the group itself, which is to ensure protection for all people regardless of any personal qualities or identity. What the HRC did in 2007 was a betrayal, plain and simple, and though they are now making a valiant attempt to rectify it the memory won't fade any time soon, and the HRC's reputation will remain low within the LGBT community until they show that they will not do this again.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Thanks to my friend kawakiisakazuki of TrueFork.org we now have a proper banner, complete with a chibi version of myself. Looking a bit more professional now, and while I was at it I changed the layout to better match it.

So, in light of that I declare this the second launch of this blog. I have a few posts in the works that I'll try to get out between end of the semester work, as well as the launch of a new series, "What Does that Really Mean?" along with the usual stand alone posts.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

I actually wrote this piece a while ago, but having just served on a panel for a higher education class where I brought up this issue I’ve been thinking about it again. Hopefully some of the people in that class will took what I said and try to apply it to their careers.

Growing up as an LGBT kid in the U.S. is largely defined by fear. Fear of what might happen if you come out to your parents, your extended family, your friends or your co-workers, and a sense of having a Sword of Damocles over your head that could drop if you come out to the wrong person or are too public about your orientation. A major way this comes into play occurs in the transitional period of moving to college, when LGBT students usually find themselves rooming with strangers who they know little about and who know little about them. The worst fear of any LGBT kid is that they could end up with a homophobe who will be violent or negatively affect their college experience, and there have been far too many cases of LGBT students leaving college altogether because of harassment from roommates and peers to simply dismiss these fears as overblown or unimportant, but in my experience the responses by administrators to this problem tend to be nonexistent, lackluster or outright dismissive.

This is a personal issue for me, since I worried about it at the beginning of my freshman year, to the point that I sent a letter to the people in charge of room assignments stating my concerns and making it clear that should a potential roommate have a problem with me I would gladly allow them to live with someone else. I never heard a word back from them and spent a good deal of time worrying about it both before and after moving in, to the point that it negatively affected my relationships with the first group of people I roomed with, who eventually moved out for unrelated reasons still not knowing that I was gay, since I'd been too scared to come out to them. I’m glad to say that the second set of roommates I ended up with were very accepting, wonderful people who also turned out to be LGBT allies, but I was one of the lucky ones. I’ve heard enough stories from my LGBT friends to say that I was far from alone when it came to roommate concerns, and in most cases the only time the issues was addressed was after something had already happened, in most cases leaving behind a level of trauma for the LGBT student and leaving them feeling unsafe in their own dorm rooms.

I’ve thought about ways to relieve this sort of stress, and probably the simplest solution would be for the usual questions about your lifestyle (what time you go to bed, whether you like to study in your room with music on, etc.) to include something along the lines of “Would you be comfortable living with an LGBT student?” with Yes and No checkboxes. It’s brief, painless, and it allows people who would have serious concerns to get them out in the open.

But despite how seemingly simple this would be to implement, several times when I’ve suggested it to people who work on the dorm staff they’ve reacted negatively to the idea, and as far as I know no college currently uses a question of this kind on their applications. I realize that their are logistical and privacy issues involved, but even with that in mind some of the responses I've gotten have been downright dismissive of the very problem a method like this would be trying to address. A justification I heard for not including it from one person in an administrative position was that college is a learning experience, so it’s good for kids to live with people who aren’t like them and have different backgrounds. This year I've had the opportunity to live with two people of very different ethnic and social backgrounds than myself, and that has been positive and eye opening experience, but I draw the line at the point when my physical and emotional safety is considered less important than someone else’s “learning experience”, not to mention the fact that it diminishes the very real fear that an LGBT student faces when they’re forced to live with someone who might hurt them.

One criticism that I’ve seen leveled at LGBT students who bring this up is that they should just come out and state their orientations right from the start, but this is a case of things being much easier said than done. I made it a point to state my orientation on my Facebook profile for precisely this reason, but other people clearly don’t pay as much attention to the “interested in” line as I do, since I still meet people I’ve added on Facebook who react with surprise when I say that I’m gay and dating another girl. Clearly that method doesn’t work at getting the information out there, and it puts an unfair burden on us to have to check with each individual person we might live with when what we should be doing is concentrating on enjoying our college experience. Forcing us to “take responsibility” for our safety in our own dorms only marginalizes us further and increases the fear that if something happens to us we’ll have nowhere to go and no one to turn to. We’re not asking to be coddled, all we want is to have our fears acknowledged and have some way to address them before something happens to us.

Besides that, the process of coming out is extremely scary, and I’ve compared it to dealing with a live landmine to try and get across how you just never know how people will react. Practically all the people I’ve chosen to come out to have had absolutely no problem with it, but there’s always the fear that there might be someone who would do serious harm to you out there, and just as you can never tell if someone is gay until they tell you it’s equally hard to spot the violent homophobes. We all know the stories of the Matthew Shepards and the Gwen Araujos, and the last thing we want to worry about is becoming a victim in our own dorm rooms, and I’ve heard far too many horror stories to dismiss homophobia on college campuses as being either uncommon or isolated incidents.

What I’m proposing wouldn’t solve all of the problems LGBT youth face on campuses, but it would help relieve a fear that no kid should have to go through when they begin their college careers. I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation to be able to feel safe in the places where we live regardless of our orientation.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

It appears that the U.S. is finally starting to catch up with the rest of the Western world on human rights and LGBT people. President Obama has said that the U.S. is going to sign onto a U.N. Gay Rights Declaration, stating that sexual orientation and gender identity are covered under international human rights protections. This act also calls for the universal repeal of laws criminalizing homosexuality and other so-called “Sodomy Laws” that allow for the prosecutions and murders of gays, lesbians and transgender people around the world.

It should be noted that earlier the Bush Administration did not sign onto this declaration under the justification of “technical legal grounds concerning federal and state jurisdiction over gay rights.” Excuse me while I roll my eyes at that and the suggestion that the states should be allowed to decide if they can execute me for being gay.

Over 60 other countries signed on to this declaration at the time it was proposed, and the ones who haven’t are places like Egypt, The Vatican, Uganda and other countries I won’t be visiting anytime soon. There are also some people using the old “Slippery Slope” argument to justify not signing it, but that’s an issue for another day.

There was a story in The Advocate yesterday about the controversy surrounding Sarah Gronert, a tennis player who was born with both male and female genitalia (also known as being born intersexed). This semester I’ve been in a college course about the Philosophy of Race and Gender, and one subject we’ve looked at is the way intersexed people are treated in our society. Gronert is facing controversy because some people are claiming that she’s not a “real” woman because of her physical strength, and that shouldn’t be allowed to play against other women as a result. To me this is a perfect example of the way our society treats intersexed people and the issues they face in our society.

Among the people who fall under the ever-growing umbrella term of LGBTQI, intersexed people get the least attention and have the least known about them by the general public. Historically intersexed people have often had to pick a gender role and are not allowed to express their identity for fear of retaliation. There have been cases of intersexed people being put to death if they refuse to conform, and it's an accepted practice for an intersexed baby to undergo surgery to "correct" their genitalia before they are old enough to give consent, and it's claimed that this is done to insure their quality of life. But despite the fact that Gronert has undergone surgery to become more female she's being treated with hostility, and as this story shows, some people are going to so far as to claim that she’s “really” a man despite legally identifying as a woman and living as a woman.

Do other people have the right to define who you are? This has been a fundamental question posed in my class and in this story, and I cannot in good conscience say that other people do have that right. From a sociological standpoint the forcing of intersexed people to choose a gender identity is a way to reinforce gender norms, since by their very nature intersexed people call our strict male/female gender dichotomy into question. In this case the idea that she’s a “threat” to the convention is made clear by the reactions of other people to her, but whether or not she does have a physical advantage because of her body structure I think is irrelevant compared to the way she’s being treated and how people are trying to define her identity for her.

I’ve posed the question of whether it really would be so bad to allow intersexed people to live openly and express their identity, but the recent elections have shown that we still have a long way to go when it comes to just tackling male/female gender differences, issues surrounding homosexuality, and the treatment of transgendered people, so unfortunately it appears that any sort of intersexed movement that might tackle issues such as this will have to wait for a time when they can make their voices heard.

Friday, March 20, 2009

A minor event that caught my attention this week was the unveiling of at “Tween” version of everyone’s favorite bilingual elementary schooler Dora the Explorer, and the resulting kerfluffle started by parents over it. But besides allegations of turning her into a mini street walker, a thing I didn’t see people focusing on were some of the wider implications of this new look and what it tells our young girls. It’s being touted that she’s now 10 and “grown out of” being a shorts-wearing tomboy and is now obsessed with fashion, friends, and all the things girls are supposed to obsess over at that age. I grew up in the late 1990s, and was by most accounts a tomboy myself, and even back then I noticed that once I hit middle school it suddenly became unacceptable for a girl to be a tomboy, we had to “grow up” and start acting like “real women.”

A necessary disclaimer at this point is that I am not, for the most part never have been, and do not try to be what’s considered a “proper” girl or woman, in part because I happen to be dating another very wonderful girl at the moment, and that tends to put a bit of a crowbar between me and conventional definitions of femininity by default. I’m also what would usually be classified as butch, though I do have my feminine aspects and am not afraid to embrace those. I think I’m a healthy distance from the usual expectations as a result, so I tend to look at these things with a sociologist’s eye and try to figure out just what function they serve in society. Back when I was 10 to 12, however, I tried to fall into what was being touted as correct for my gender and tried to get into fashion and makeup, or to quote a friend of mine, “Let the programming begin!”

Now of course if you refuse to go along with it the insults begin, and at about the same time I realized that being a tomboy at that age was culturally unacceptable I had my first experience of homophobia. In retrospect the girls who first introduced me to the term “lesbo” were absolutely right, but we didn’t know that at the time and it doesn’t change the fact that they were using the term as a slur, a way of categorizing an outsider and a deviant.

Girls who refuse to conform to the expectations of femininity and continue being tomboys after the acceptable age often find themselves accused of being lesbians, and by extension defective women. This is what’s referred to by sociologists as “boundary policing”, and this sort of behavior extends beyond gender and racial definitions into all sort of groups that seek to define themselves against others and decide who’s in and who’s out. This in itself isn’t bad, but this behavior can very often be used to reinforce existing norms of behavior and allow them to go unquestioned, even if they’re in drastic need of a reevaluation.

So what does this have to do with Dora? The media is possibly the largest source of boundary policing in our culture, and it plays a huge role in shaping what we think we “should” look like, feel like and act like. The extent of the reaction against the image projected by this new Dora doll shows how many parents rely on this character to help their children through childhood, so there’s little doubt that Dora’s influence is huge. I’m not disturbed by the feminizing that Dora has been subjected to in and of itself, but rather it’s the idea that a little girl not unlike what I used to be like might be given this doll and start to doubt herself and her puddle hopping and frog collecting hobbies and trade them in for makeup and fashion not because she wants to, but because she thinks she has to.

I eventually said “screw this” to what was expected of me and chopped all my hair off when I was 15, but in my middle school years I felt that I had to become obsessed with makeup, fashion and boys, and when I found that I didn’t really care for any of those I started thinking something was wrong with me, which no doubt contributed to the depression I was already struggling with.

So my main questions about this “new” Dora are about what it’s really trying to accomplish, and if the little tomboy girls who have followed this character are about to find themselves pushed into a box that they don’t necessarily fit into, and if parents really want to enforce such a strict definition of femininity.

I supposed a brief introduction is in order. I was raised in Massachusetts and am currently attending college in Boston, I'm a sociology major and a philosophy minor, both of my parents were journalists, I am a brunette, a gay woman and I wear glasses.

This blog will mainly serve as a place I can put the various musings I have on subjects like gender, sexual orientation, politics and whatever else happens to catch my fancy. Since I'm being trained in sociology I tend to look at things through that sort of lens, so expect to see a lot of talk about norms and societal expectations. It will likely update sporadically, but since my thoughts about these subjects happen frequently they'll likely be new material fairly often.